Studio Brief 2 - Creating Grid

Creating my own grid

In order to created every letter of the alphabet we needed to create a grid, so when we start creating our type in illustrator we can work of the grid as guide lines.

Before creating the grid for any typefaces i wanted to make sure i could design a few more letters and not just the letter A, so i experimented with more uppercase and lowercase as shown below

Both typefaces that i wanted to take forward both worked for upper and lowercase letters as long with a few symbols.

So onto my grids, this was the typeface for the first one.

This the grid for the typeface above i soon came to the realisation that as a set this typeface wouldn't be legible or readable due to how much I'd have to block each letter out. However the grid did actually work but unfortunately the typeface didn't.

Moving onto my second choice, i also created a working grid to apply to this design.

 My first attempt to create a grid for this typeface, which was a successful attempt.

Producing the whole alphabet (upper case)

In this image i created the whole lowercase alphabet along with symbols and numbers from 1-9, i heard you get brownie points for producing the lower and uppercase letters.

How i created the grid

Whether I've done it correctly or not is another story but i shall explain my process anyway.
Firstly i designed the letter 'A' without using a grid system but after it's been designed i then create a grid for that letter (if that makes sense) so using lines to measure up the width and height of that letter a long with the base line, x height, ascender and descender. From the grid i created for the letter 'A' i then draw out that grid exactly the same for the next letter which would be "B" however if the B didn't fit exactly within the grid of the A then i added on extra grid lines to suit it's purpose so by doing this ill just keep building on each letters in till i have a grid that will end up working on all letters.

Hopefully that makes sense, it might not be the correct way but it worked for me with out any problems. I also know that people used the grid system from their chosen typeface but for me this would not of worked out as my design has a longer ascender and descender so wouldn't be usable in my case.

Feedback

I received a lot of feedback on my crit about my grid, which helped me a lot. However the main focus on my feedback was to experiment more with the grid. The group liked my grid setup but saw a few loop holes with some of the letters, as some wasn't following the grid. So we went through both upper and lower case letters and picked out which letters didn't exactly fit in with other. For example the counters on the p and R were different sizes.

However with this all said, it was only an my first time trying out the whole alphabet so i was bound to make a few mistakes. Going into the crit my main purpose was to make sure I had a working grid and had set it up correctly, also to get feedback on my chosen design and that it does in fact work well in other letters and not just 'A'. So the overall opinion was that my Alphabet does work and is already looking like a digital typeface which in return means there won't be any restriction as it should be straight forward producing and setting up the grid in illustrator.